Canterbury Press recently laid off 42 employees and has become the latest victim in the continuing trend of consolidation and closures in the printing industry. The company was expected to close its doors for the good after a skeleton crew finished wrapping things up.

This closure is part of a continuing trend in the industry as printing companies have been closing up or merging with other printers at a rate of approximately 10% each year. In 1995, there were 62,000 printers in the United States and now there are about 38,000. Industry experts expect the number to continue declining until leveling out around 35,000. The print shops left standing will likely be larger organizations and not small, mom and pop operations.

In October 2006, Canterbury Press installed a new eight-color press which went online in January 2007. The new press boosted their capacity and led to a prediction of double-digit sales growth. The new press had the capacity to print four colors simultaneously on two sides at a speed of 12,000 to 15,000 sheets per hour. However, the continued development of the Internet and growing competition from overseas printers resulted in fewer printing jobs to go around.

Monotype Imaging Inc. is a leading global provider of text imaging solutions and has recently expanded its Monotype(R), Linotype(R), and ITC(R) typeface collections with more than 100 designs.

New to the Monotype Library is the Slate Condensed family by Rod MacDonald, which is elegant yet functional. The fonts add six space-saving designs to the original Slate family. Another new addition is the Givens Antiqua family drawn by George Ryan and named in honor of the company’s first president and chief executive officer and current chairman of the board. The Givens Antiqua design employs a generous x-height and open proportions to promote readability.

New to the Linotype Library is the Eurostile Next family designed by Akira Kobayashi, type director at Linotype. This font is an enhanced and expanded version of the widely used Eurostile typeface family. Also new is Calligrapher Gaynor Goffe which brings the Hamada typeface, a script design that captures the feeling of ink on paper. New to the ITC Library is ITC Mattia, a design from Giuseppe Errico and is a distinctive handwriting font with scrawled letterforms.

Sylexiad is a font created by Rob Hillier, a dyslexic graphic designer from Norwich that is helping people with the condition to read more easily. The typeface is designed to accentuate the characteristics that help dyslexics to distinguish between letters.

It is being hailed as a potential breakthrough in enabling people with the condition to read more easily. Hillier found that in 2000, there was a great interest in the Higher Education sector, and particularly art and design, in dyslexia. He started to question his own reading difficulties as a result and found that he was dyslexic. At the time, there was a recommendation by dyslexia organizations for Arial, Times New Roman and Sassoon Primary.

Hillier decided to identify the factors that have a bearing on how easily dyslexics can read different fonts, and then create a new typeface countering these factors. He designed Sylexiad so that none of the letters is a mirror image of another. In the process of developing this typeface, he gained his PhD. Hillier hopes to find as wide a readership as possible for the font and it has already been taken on as Norwich School of Art and Design’s art school’s official font.

The creation, meaning, and marketing of typefaces have its own thriving niche market with at least 400 typographic aficionados converging on Buffalo, New York in the middle of July for TypeCon 2008. For these people and thousands of designers, artists and fans of visual culture all over the world, typography is an ancient art form that reflects culture and history.

Compared to 50 years ago, the number of people who have heard of fonts and use them has multiplied a thousandfold, according to Charles Bigelow, a professor of typography at Rochester Institute of Technology and co-designer of the family of typefaces called Lucinda. To a book designer or a newspaper designer, a typeface is a very important choice in communicating an idea that they want someone else to understand. For example, there are the design choices of the 2008 presidential candidates: to represent Senator Barack Obama’s message of optimism, his campaign chose the Gotham typeface which looks refined and progressive. Senator Hillary Clinton, who lost, used the more conservative New Baskerville font based in the mid-1700s and Senator John McCain uses the popular typeface Optima.

Typefaces themselves have a history all their own. German Blackletter, for example, was a form of typeface used throughout Europe since 1100 A.D. and into the 20^th century and now has connotations with gang culture used in tattoos and on rap albums.

Wal-Mart’s logo of 17 years is gone. The sharp, uppercase letters and the pointy star that served as a hyphen have been replaced by a new logo that includes rounded, lowercase characters. The star has been replaced by a symbol that resembles a sunburst or flower and appears after the “Walmart” name. Wal-Mart stores officially unveiled the new logo on June 30.

The updated logo made its start online on July 1, although, the old logo still appears on the site of Wal-Mart’s parent company. The new logo’s debut coincides with CEO H. Lee Scott’s goal of transforming Wal-Mart into a more environmentally friendly corporation. Analysts feel that the new sunburst logo seems to say that the company is more eco-aware. Over the past two years, Wal-Mart has increasingly offered sustainable packaging and products.

Some observers see the new logo as a sign that the retailer might becoming more original as the previous star graphic was seen as a generic symbol. The new typeface breaks the company’s 46-year tradition of using bold capital letters for friendlier lowercase in an attempt to recast itself as a kinder, gentler company.